"How Government destroys moral character"

An excellent short piece from the San Francisco Examiner by Robert Higgs. Well worth the read;

“Thou shalt not steal” is a rule as old as human society itself. We are taught early to respect what belongs to others, and by the time we are three years old, we understand the difference between mine and thine. Those who do not take the lesson to heart and persist in treating everybody’s property as something to take, so long as they can get away with it, are viewed as sociopaths.

Yet government as we know it rests entirely on this kind of sociopathy. Rulers take what does not belong to them and dispose of it to suit themselves.